Re: Mining rig extraordinaire - the Trenton BPX6806 18-slot PCIe backplane [PICS]

Quote from: RulerOf on September 20, 2012, 03:35:43 AM

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At the beginning of the thread is a list of parts and the total that I have spent on all of them. Wonder if someone is interested in buying it...

Probably a bunch of people, myself included, but I guess I would need some more info.

How's the 3D performance of the PCIe cards through the x4(?) electrical connection?

To your knowledge, is there an SHB available (probably AMD-based) that will allow me to pack at least 36 cores into the box? And at least 64 GB of RAM?

I've built two multi-headed gaming boxes now out of my old mining hardware. Fun stuff. If there's a realistic way to stuff 18 heads into a single case (Oh hrm, I'd need more GPUs Cheesy

), I'd be open to looking into it.

It's still available. I unfortunately don't know how well 3D would do on a link smaller than x16. I think there have been studies on it to show that the gaming performance hit would be nil, but rendering and other such workloads would take a major hit.

This is the most powerful SHB on the market that I know of: http://www.trentonsystems.com/products/single-board-computers/picmg-13/bxt7059
It supports up to two 8-core Intel Xeon E5-2448L processors (16 physical and 32 virtual cores with HT), and up to 96GB of RAM if you use 16GB modules in all 6 slots.

If you will be processing video, you will want this backplane instead: http://www.trentonsystems.com/products/backplanes/picmg-13-backplanes/video-processing-gpu-backplane-bpg8032
It has x16 links on all slots.

As for how many cards you can actually install and use... you would be on your own there. It requires virtualization and/or driver tricks that I have no idea how to do (that's mainly why this project flopped), and possibly BIOS mods depending on how you are trying to make it work.

If you want it, let me know.